May I present to you a song made famous by football and Luciano Pavarotti, ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for 'Nessun dorma'!

As I'm a guy of a certain age, this song first came to my world in 1990, with Italia 90, the first FIFA World Cup that I truly watched. This song was used for the opening sequences of the football coverage by the BBC (video here) and even now, some 21 years later, I still get emotional when I hear it start.

The song, of course, had a life long before someone needed an Italian song for a football intro. It comes from Puccini's opera Turandot, which had it's first performance at La Scala in Milan in 1926. Pavarotti sang Nessun Dorma as one of "The Three Tenors" (along with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras) in their famed first concert held on the eve of the tournament's final match, added a certain level of class to proceedings that, in my opinion hasn't been matched since. The song has been quoted as 'intellectualizing football' in the UK, depicting it in an operatic fashion, rather than just 22 men running around a field. Pavarotti sang the song publicly for the last time at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, about a year and a half before his death in 2007.

The words are actually quite easy, but to quote a friend whose name I won't mention here, 'if in doubt, plagiarize', so this translation is courtesy of Wikipedia.

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About Me

In 2004 I met an Italian and my life changed forever. Since then, I've been exploring my little bit of Italy, the area just north of Rome in regione Lazio, one weekend away at a time.
This blog details my journey along with hints and tips on how to survive off the tourist trail in 'real' Italy.